The Garlic Ballads

“Do you have a stone for a heart?” the doctor asked angrily. “Take your baby home and treat her well. When she’s eighteen you can get at least ten thousand for her.”

A middle-aged woman shuffled out the door, her rumpled hair looking like a bird’s nest, her clothing torn and tattered, and a grimy face that looked anything but human. The man handed her the bundled-up baby as he went to fetch his pushcart, in which she sat opposite a dung basket filled with black dirt. After slipping the harness around his neck, he took a few faltering steps before the cart flipped over, dumping his wife and the baby in her arms onto the ground. She was wailing, the baby was bawling, he was weeping.

Gao Yang heaved a sigh; so did the man standing beside him.

The doctor walked up. “Where’d that other cart come from?”

“Doctor,” a flustered Gao Yang replied, “my wife’s going to have a baby.”

The doctor raised her arm, peeled back a rubber glove, and looked at her watch. “No sleep for me tonight,” she muttered.

“When did the contractions start?”

“About … maybe as long as it takes to eat a meal.”

“Then there’s plenty of time. Wait your turn.”

The lightbulb and moonlight illuminated the area. The fair-skinned doctor, who had large features on a round face, went from one cart to the next, poking and probing distended abdomens. To the woman lying in the westernmost cart, a little horse-drawn affair, she said, “Screaming like that only makes it worse. Look at the others. You don’t see them carrying on like that, do you? Is this your first?”

The little man standing beside the wagon answered for his wife: “Her third.”

“Your third?” the doctor replied, obviously displeased. “How can you scream like that? And what’s that awful smell? Have you soiled yourself? Body odor shouldn’t stink that bad!”

The woman, properly chastised, stopped screaming.

“You should have washed up before coming,” the doctor said.

“We’re sorry, Doctor,” the little man said apologetically, “but we’ve been too busy harvesting garlic the past few days … plus there are the kids to worry about.”

“And here you are, having another?”

“The other two are girls,” he explained. “Farmers need sons to help in the fields. Girls grow up and marry out of the family. What good’s a child who can’t do hard work? Besides, people laugh if you don’t have a son.”

“If you brought up a daughter like the famous Dowager Empress, you’d have something far better than ten thousand of your precious sons,” the doctor countered.

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?” the little man said. “Any child born to parents as ugly as us is lucky if it’s not crippled, blind, deaf, or dumb. All this talk of having a child with a pedigree is just that — talk.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” the doctor replied. “A plain chrysalis brings forth a lovely butterfly, so what’s to stop a couple like you from producing a future party chairman?”

“With a mother who looks like her? I’d fall to my knees and kowtow till the end of time if she gave me a son whose features managed to be in the right places,” the little man said.

From the bed of the wagon, the woman strained to sit up. “What makes you think you’re so goddamned desirable? Look at yourself in a puddle of piss if you want to see what I see: rat eyes, a toad’s mouth, the ears of a jackass, all stooped over like a turtle. I must have been blind to marry someone like you!”

He giggled. “I wasn’t bad looking in my youth.”

“Dog fart! You looked more animal than human. As bad as the hideous Wu Dalang, maybe worse!”

That got a laugh out of the others, including the doctor, whose gaping mouth could have accommodated a whole apple. Nearby fields were suffused with joyous airs, as the fragrance of datura plants finally won out over the outhouse stench. A pale green moth flitted in the air around the lightbulb, and the ugly couple’s white pony pawed the ground happily.

Okay, it’s your turn,” the doctor said to the woman.

The little man lifted his wife down off the wagon. You’d have thought he was killing her, the way she groaned. “Stop that!” he demanded, giving her a rap on the head. “The first time it hurts, the second time it goes smoothly, and the third’s like taking a shit.”

She scratched his face. “Your mother’s burning hemorrhoids! How do you know what it’s like — ow, Mother, it’s killing me!”

“You’re a couple of real gems,” the doctor commented, “a match made in heaven.”

“The scar-faced woman marries a harelipped man. That way nobody has any complaints,” the little man said.

“Screw your mother! After this one’s born, I’m starting divorce proceedings … ow, Mother!”

The doctor led the woman inside. “Wait here,” she said to the husband, who paused in the doorway for a moment, then walked back to his wagon and picked up his feedbag. The white pony snorted loudly as it began munching the feed.

The other three expectant fathers clustered around the little man, who handed cigarettes around. Gao Yang, not used to smoking, had a fit of coughing. “Where are you from?” the little man asked him.